THE WORLD

Each of the two parts of the exhibition GLOBALE, curated by Peter Weibel, contains one installation by Thomas Feuerstein (b. 1968), i.e. MANIFESTO and POEM. The artist's spectacular exhibition series PSYCHOPROSA (2015), at Taxisgalerie Innsbruck, Kunstverein Heilbronn and above all at Frankfurter Kunstverein, finds its continuation in 2016, in extended form, at the Chronos Art Center Shanghai. Curator Zhang Ga (New York, Shanghai) speaks of one of the most essential contributions to contemporary art. Starting out from a base of empirical, scientific observation and drawing on the reality of contemporary human society, Thomas Feuerstein develops his artistic narratives, futuristic sketches between dystopia and utopia. His exhibitions come across as semantic webs that take up threads of reality and entangle the observer in stories oscillating between fact and fiction.

In THE WORLD, a large-format charcoal drawing, the artist sends us on a journey on board an allegorical vehicle, the largest private yacht in the world. Like a Flying Dutchman the latter hovers above the ocean and navigates us through the exhibition at Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman Vienna, right into the installation ensemble of recent works, made of sugar, coal, cyanobacteria and slime. Graphic works, speaking of the dissolving concept of man, guide us towards the sculptural slime installation ACCADEMIA DEI SECRETI, whose glass apparatuses are covered in threads and large drops of slime. Cyanobacteria (blue-green algae), which the artist has repeatedly been using as carriers of meaning and work material, on canvases draw maps of fictitious geographies and become a tableau for painting. Everyday objects, chiseled from age-old hard coal, turn into fossils. The sculpture LONG SWEET DIARY, built out of sugar, reminds us of the role the energy supplier plays for our speaking tool, which is also our store of meaning.